Aadhaar’s implicit patriarchy

This was originally written in May 2017, but not published at that time as I became distracted with the trolling incident.

A decade ago, colleagues at work who were creating biometric-backed ration cards in Karnataka explained to me why identity documents were such a hard problem. That discussion happened years before Aadhaar existed, and as I hope to show here, Aadhaar has tackled these challenges, but in a manner that reinforces the problematic patriarchal state.

What is patriarchy? From Wikipedia:

Patriarchy is a social system in which males hold primary power and predominate in roles of political leadership, moral authority, social privilege and control of property. In the domain of the family, fathers or father-figures hold authority over women and children.

The ‘patriarchal state’ refers not to a government run by men, but to the idea that the state occupies the role of the patriarch in society, replacing the family patriarch and deciding on what is good for all. But let’s get through the detail first.

First, everyone needs identity. We take this as a given. If you disagree, consider the fact that you have a name. That too is identity.

Prior to Aadhaar, there was no national identity register. The number of touchpoints the central government has with an individual citizen is surprisingly small. Look in your wallet. What do you have that’s issued by the central government?

1. Maybe an election id card, which you will have only if you are over 18 years of age. It probably has typos from bad data entry, the black and white photograph looks nothing like you, and depending on how old you are, the card may have been issued years ago, so you don’t even live where the card says you do. About 40% of India is under 18 and therefore excluded (as per the 2011 census).
2. Perhaps a PAN card? Only if you earn enough to have to pay income tax, or you got it specifically for use as id. While election id cards exclude anyone under 18, PAN cards are even more exclusive, shunned by anyone who doesn’t earn enough, or who doesn’t want to be in the tax net.
3. How about a passport? Far fewer people travel abroad, so even more exclusive.
4. What if you took the census, a super comprehensive register that covers every single resident of India, and issued id cards from it? This was the aim of the National Population Register, a failed competitor to Aadhaar. The trouble with the census? It’s only conducted once in a decade, and has no record of anyone who was born, has died or has simply moved within the decade.

None of these represent a comprehensive register of Indian residents. You may have a state-issued identity card such as a driving license. Some state registers like ration cards are fairly comprehensive, covering most of the population, albeit documenting families rather than individuals (with one ration card per family). Even individual-based state documents aren’t necessarily portable. Your driving license may be valid all over India, but there is considerable variance in their form, from booklets to laminated paper to plastic smart cards. How is a traffic constable in Tamil Nadu to verify your Himachali licence if she’s never encountered one before? With 36 license issuing territories in India, there will always be somewhere it’s suspect.

Characteristics of a national id

Building a national identity document that hopes to cover 100% of the population has some key challenges.

1. Not out-of-date

Identity documents go out-of-date if there’s no incentive to keep them updated. Your “address proof” document may have an address that you don’t live at anymore. Why would you care unless you need a service at your current address? Take a passport that’s valid for a decade. The address on it bears no consequences for foreign travel (the passport’s intended use case). Why would you go through the hassle of getting a new passport every time you move house? It helps if your identity document has multiple, frequently-encountered uses, giving you incentive to keep the details updated, so the address on the document is actually the address where you live.

2. Usage is incentivised

To incentivise you to keep your details up-to-date, your service provider needs an incentive as well to collect this id document from you, and thereby goad you into keeping it updated. Think about why your bank is pestering you to link your Aadhaar. eKYC is a great incentive for service providers that are obliged to maintain KYC (Know Your Customer) records. Deduplication does it for others.

3. Digital identity

Let’s say you run a website and you need to verify a customer’s identity. They send you a scanned copy of their PAN card or passport. How are you to tell you’re transacting with the owner of the document and that it isn’t stolen? There are many ways to design digital verification and Aadhaar’s choices are questionable, but the important thing is that it’s part of the design.

As we move to a society that increasingly transacts online—whether shopping online or paying your taxes online—we will need digital identity verification to replace paper and plastic id cards.

4. Exists without form

This identity document should ideally not be a physical document, because those things have attached hassles. They cost money to produce and distribute, and there will always be disagreements on whether this cost is borne by the taxpayer or the individual. Consider the ₹500 note in your wallet. All those security features aren’t free. They cost money to design and print, and yet you didn’t pay for them by purchasing the note. The production cost was offloaded on the taxpayer instead.

An identity card with security features will cost something to produce, but if you hope to cover 100% of the population, you will inevitably run into people who can’t afford whatever price is charged, and if you discount for them, you’ll get other people upset about this. Add to this, physical documents can be lost or damaged.

But there’s something else that can happen to physical documents: they can be seized. Employers impounding passports of manual labourers in foreign countries are such a problem that the government has an “emigration check required (ECR)” status for some people, to save them from such situations.

A rather more mundane form of seizure: parents holding identity documents for their children, for the safety of said documents, but also as a form of control. This form of control is so ingrained in our psyche that it can take some effort to understand why it’s a problem. We need a detour into patriarchy.

Politics of patriarchy

Consider the words “husband” and “wife”. They are gendered terms for two people in a marital relationship, but unlike “father” and “mother”, they are not symmetric. The origin of these words reveals the power imbalance:

Husband: late Old English (in the senses ‘male head of a household’ and ‘manager, steward’), from Old Norse húsbóndi ‘master of a house’, from hús ‘house’ + bóndi ‘occupier and tiller of the soil’. The original sense of the verb was ‘till, cultivate’.

Wife: Old English wīf ‘woman’, of Germanic origin; related to Dutch wijf and German Weib.

Husband as ‘master’ and wife as simply a ‘woman’. Even the Hindi words pati and patni have the same original meanings. The term Rashtrapati for the President literally means ‘husband of the nation’. When Pratibha Patil became India’s first female President, many argued her title should remain Rashtrapati (one, two, three): the arguments are all based on distinguishing the ‘husband’ and ‘master’ meanings of the term, arguing that it could stand for one but not the other.

This patriarchal construct of the husband/father being the head of the household, the breadwinner and protector, are so ingrained in our psyche that when we encounter a matriarchal society we look upon it as a curiosity. We don’t notice patriarchal constructs because we expect them as the normal.

A patriarchy may embody a protective relationship, but it can also be an abusive one. Witness the narrative of the drunken/abusive/apathetic husband/father, where the family needs the assistance of a greater authority, and where the state readily steps in with a Ministry of Women and Child Development (or ‘Department’, depending on the state). Whether this or the ECR stamp, the state regularly substitutes a dysfunctional family patriarchy with the patriarchal state.

Aadhaar’s patriarchal conceit

Identity documents can be seized and wielded as a form of control. What can a benevolent state do to rescue citizens from the tyranny of petty patriarchy? What if you explicitly design your identity document to need no physical document? Why not keep a register of the person’s basic essence, their body, something that can never be taken away from them?

This is indeed the imagination of Aadhaar and is the basis of refrains such as “Aadhaar is just a number” or “your id proof is yourself,” and on the use of biometrics for id verification.

(And because this is all too alien for systems that expect to see a physical document, there’s also an ‘Aadhaar card’, a printout with no security features whatsoever, the source of half of Aadhaar’s woes. The other half is because biometric matching is an imprecise science that fails too often.)

This patriarchal state imagination of Aadhaar was on full display earlier this year when the Attorney General argued in the Supreme Court that Indians do not have an absolute right to their own bodies.

In the past, children were considered property of their parents:

In 1874, a badly beaten girl known only as Mary Ellen became the first legally recognized victim of Child Abuse in the United States. Before 1874, society offered little protection for minors. Children were considered the property of their parents, and neither the government nor private individuals intervened when they were injured, overworked, or neglected. Mary Ellen was rescued from unfit parents only after the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) stepped in on her behalf. ASPCA advocates pointed out that if Mary Ellen were a horse or a dog, her mistreatment would be prohibited by statute. A judge agreed that the young girl deserved at least the same protection as an animal.

Married women used to be effectively the property of their husbands:

By marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law: that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband: under whose wing, protection, and cover, she performs every thing; and is therefore called in our law-French a feme-covert; is said to be covert-baron, or under the protection and influence of her husband, her baron, or lord; and her condition during her marriage is called her coverture.

The Indian Penal Code continues to recognise married women as the property of their husbands.

Combine these principles and you have the husband/father, the head of the household, effectively controlling his family as his property. This is classical patriarchy.

Look now at how the Attorney General defended Aadhaar in the Supreme Court earlier this year:

Citizens don't have absolute right over their bodies: Government - Times of India

Aadhaar wants to be your husband/father figure. Its creator even protests to its benevolence. But should the relationship turn abusive, as nothing guarantees future benevolence, what greater authority can you possibly turn to for relief? Especially when the Aadhaar Act establishes UIDAI as the arbiter of abuse?

Clause 47(1) of the Aadhaar Act

The patriarchal state is problematic

Patriarchy oppresses women and sexual minorities. Far from establishing a benevolent state that rescues citizens from patriarchy, the patriarchal state is often even more oppressive. When a patriarch decides what is good for everyone, one of the outcomes is majoritarianism, the idea that a compromise that is good for the majority must be acceptable to everyone.

For instance, because most people are cisgender and heterosexual, you get policy making and a legal framework that assumes everyone is cisgender and heterosexual, requiring decades of pushback from the feminist and LGBT movements to get the transgender and homosexual categories accepted into policy and law.

Or in Aadhaar’s case, because most people have fingers on their hands and eyes on their face, biometric authentication is assumed to work for everyone. (As one example.)

We can all learn from feminism

Feminism is hard to understand for anyone who’s not a scholar. The Urban Dictionary echoes the lay person’s understanding:

Judging by what it does feminism is a movement that seeks superior rights and privileges for women while hiding under the guise of “equality”

Most of us have to make do with understanding feminism from its achievements rather than its theories. From Wikipedia:

Feminist movements have campaigned and continue to campaign for women’s rights, including the right to vote, to hold public office, to work, to earn fair wages or equal pay, to own property, to receive education, to enter contracts, to have equal rights within marriage, and to have maternity leave. Feminists have also worked to promote bodily autonomy and integrity, and to protect women and girls from rape, sexual harassment, and domestic violence.

Feminist campaigns are generally considered to be a main force behind major historical societal changes for women’s rights, particularly in the West, where they are near-universally credited with achieving women’s suffrage, gender neutrality in English, reproductive rights for women (including access to contraceptives and abortion), and the right to enter into contracts and own property. Although feminist advocacy is, and has been, mainly focused on women’s rights, some feminists, including bell hooks, argue for the inclusion of men’s liberation within its aims because men are also harmed by traditional gender roles.

It’s easy to underestimate the significance of feminism’s achievements if you have no understanding of what life was like before, or how hard it is to push against the combined might of patriarchy and the patriarchal state.

“Your father named you.” Does that sound odd? Surely it was your parents and not just your father? Not in the past era of coverture, when only your father had legal rights. Coverture may have been a British import, but it influenced the Indian woman’s experience of the law. You have to thank feminism for this change.

Identity comes from within

Perhaps the biggest lesson from feminism is that identity is not something given to you by patriarchy, but yours to define for yourself.

The notion that “you can be anyone you want to be” only works in a system that recognises your right to define your own identity. Witness this Quora user’s struggles to engage with the community on a simple question: “As an Indian wife, what do you wish your husband knew?” Take some time to read it. It’s illustrative.

The “Progressive Husband” And Benevolent Patriarchy On Quora

We all have multiple identities, and that’s okay

I will attempt to illustrate how Aadhaar’s patriarchal imagination creates a blurry line between benevolence and harm, even with seemingly trivial issues. I’ll use a personal example.

Last year I asked one of the architects of Aadhaar how an individual’s name was handled. He said it was a free form text field. Aadhaar doesn’t distinguish between your given name and family name. You can call yourself anything you want, as long as you have a supporting document. I thought this was an enlightened choice, and reflective of the Aadhaar team’s concern for what they were creating. Now I fear it wasn’t good enough.

My name is Kiran Jonnalagadda. It is what I use everywhere. It also gets me into trouble frequently, because too many entities are convinced my name is something else.

1. As it happens, I was named in a tradition that uses the ‘family name, middle name, given name’ order, and accordingly I am ‘Jonnalagadda Chandra Kiran’. In my early years encountering identity record systems, I used this naming order.
2. Many places require an explicit ‘first, middle, last’ order in your name. I’m now ‘Kiran’ in places where I could insist on using my actual first name, ‘Kiran Chandra’ when they also required a middle name, and ‘Chandra Kiran’ in places where they insisted on using the order in the identity document.
3. Sometimes I have different names with the same service provider. My bank manager will address me as Mr Kiran or Mr Chandra depending on whether it’s about my personal or business account.

(If this doesn’t seem severe enough, ask any woman who’s had to change her last name after marriage, or worse, first name, because some traditions demand that.)

Does Aadhaar solve this problem for me, by being agnostic about the parts of my name? On the contrary, it makes it worse.

Aadhaar doesn’t have an opinion on how you write your name, but the problem is that Aadhaar expects that there is only one way to write your name, whichever you choose. This so-called choice robs me of the actual choice of continuing to live with multiple names. Look at what happened earlier this year when PAN cards and Aadhaar were linked and the names didn’t match:

Move to link Aadhaar and PAN hits hurdle on names

While PAN requires disclosure of the full name of the individual including the initials in a name, the Aadhaar database does not insist on disclosure of the full name of the individual.

This has meant that many taxpayers have not been able to link their PAN with Aadhaar.

Changing of names is also not an easy process with the tax department prodding taxpayers to get their names changed in the Aadhaar database rather than in the PAN database.

The income tax department wanted you to change your Aadhaar to reflect the same name as on your PAN card, while Aadhaar wants an existing id proof such as PAN to effect this name change. This ridiculous standoff was resolved when the income tax department blinked and accepted responsibility. This is going to repeat everywhere else you link Aadhaar.

What was previously a inconvenience is now going to force me to deal with the consequences of every service provider having an unpredictable response to a name mismatch. In a future where Aadhaar is linked to everything and I get a single representation of my name everywhere, I get two choices:

1. Accept ‘Chandra’ as my first name, thereby robbing me of an identity of a lifetime, or
2. Insist on ‘Kiran’ being moved to first name status, changing it on all identity documents linked to Aadhaar, with all attendant consequences, and triggering scrutiny when travelling abroad to a foreign regime that has no sympathy for Aadhaar forcing me to change my name. (I use foreign regimes as an easy-to-understand example, but this of course applies to any institution unprepared for Aadhaar’s side effects.)

We know for a fact that Aadhaar’s architects worried about how they handled names. And yet, how did they miss this problem with multiple representations for a name? Either:

1. It simply escaped their imagination,
2. They thought about it and decided on having a single representation, or
3. They didn’t think their name field was meant to be authoritative (my guess).

Consider again:

1. Would this problem exist if I had a single representation of my name all my life? No. This is not a trivial expectation however, as names represent traditions. Consider the unique history of the Tamil tradition.
2. Did Aadhaar’s architects recognise that names are complicated and not to be trifled with? Yes.
3. Did Aadhaar get presented as the one authoritative identity register to fix the errors in all other registers (a.k.a. deduplication)? Yes.
4. Will other systems continue to insist on their own rules, such as having no initials (PAN card) or first-middle-last order (banks)? Yes.
5. Did Aadhaar’s representation of authority clash horribly with naming plurality? Yes.

This is your patriarchal state at play. They chose what was best for the majority, thereby eroding my liberty to exist under multiple names, and the liberty of other service providers to have their own rules. My names aren’t even secret. I have nothing to hide, no fraud to be exposed. I simply do not want the hassle of dealing with a third party that can’t handle a name change, or wants me to jump through hoops for it.

(And in all of this, we haven’t even considered representations in anything other than the English alphabet.)

Update: The Karnataka government thinks this can be solved with software. This will not end well.

Karnataka develops tool to nix name mismatch issue for Aadhaar seeding

We have a right to multiple identities, public or secret

Your name is just one facet of your identity. We all have multiple facets, from your place in the gender spectrum to where you supposedly live, and multiple simultaneously valid identities, from being a meek cat on the street to a tiger in bed, a disciplinarian at work to a stand-up comic on stage, a transgender inside but binary on the passport so you can travel safely. These multiple simultaneous and siloed identities are how we negotiate our way through life, how we maintain the fragile condition of our existence. These are hard-won liberties from decades of pushing back against the patriarchal state. To lose them is to be repressed.

Did they know?

One has to wonder at this point: Aadhaar’s creators and proponents clearly put considerable thought and effort into creating a national identity database. Did it occur to them that rather than liberate citizens by giving them identity, they were arming the patriarchal state, giving it power to increase its hold over citizens, to enforce a monotonous, patriarchal vision of identity, to erode decades of progress for civil liberties?

Recommended reading for additional background: Gore Vidal’s 1990 essay, Notes on Our Patriarchal State (PDF; source).

My thanks to the several individuals who read drafts and provided valuable criticism. Yours is welcome too. Please leave a response.